The alarm sounds first. "Do something. / They are everywhere. / Look:" It is the voice of a panicking official or a nervous neighbour scanning the street for danger. Then the colon opens a lineup of evidence, and the evidence is a series of old women doing things that are ordinary, funny, or quietly brave. The poem's central idea is that "witch" is what a fearful world calls women who are no longer anxious to please. By the end, the accusation has become a form of praise.
The accused are never described as witches. They are simply caught in the act. Nearly every stanza is built around an *-ing* word: Louise "washing," Elizabeth "leaving," Bea "hunting," Susan "plucking" and "killing," Ann "sharing." There are almost no finite verbs, so each woman is frozen mid-gesture, like a snapshot in a case file. The poem is arranged like a prosecutor's exhibits, but the details keep betraying the prosecutor. Louise, "wrinkled" and "naked and unashamed," sings a hymn at a conference-center sink. The body that society hides is treated as nothing to apologize for, and the sacred and the bodily sit comfortably together. The alliteration of "naked and unashamed" has an easy, unbothered sound.
Elizabeth's stanza carries the highest stakes. She is "unafraid / to die in her house alone," and the near-echo of "alone" with "nursing home" two lines later quietly sets her choice against the institution. She leaves "on the arm of her 90-year old attorney," a comic and tender image: an escape engineered by someone nearly as old as she is, with the law on her side. The adjective "nasty" is the most openly opinionated word in the poem, and it is aimed at the place, not the woman.
The middle stanza turns to friendship. Hazel, Marion and Jean are "Three Graces, Weird Sisters," a pairing that sets classical beauty beside the three witches of *Macbeth*. The poem gives the women both identities at once. Their "dirty jokes about the curate" and the "roses from the old gay priest" suggest a church that has not been cleaned up for show. Laughter and affection pass between the sexes and across orthodoxy, and the women are the ones who make that happen.
Bea's stanza is the most solitary and the most playful with the title. She is out "at dawn / along the lake, / hunting warblers, / fossils, walking fern." Here "hunting" is a pursuit of birds, stones and plants, a hunt for wonder. The list moves from living to ancient to a plant whose very name, "walking fern," sounds like a small spell. Her knowledge of the natural world is the "dangerous" learning that witch stories have always attached to women.
Susan darkens the picture, and the poem is wise to include her. In "goatskin gloves," plucking nettles and "killing chickens / in their sleep," she is practical, a little ruthless, and at home with the stinging and the slaughter that country life involves. The hard *k* sounds of "plucking," "killing" and "chickens" make the line sharper than any other. The poem does not turn these women into saints. They are capable, which is part of what frightens people.
Ann's stanza closes the poem with a shift in time and tone. She shares her "cane-stool / with the young ones / in Washington / just before the war." The poem does not say which war, or what the occasion was, but the mention of "the young ones" and the shared seat suggest, as an inference, some gathering of protest or vigil. The generosity is small and physical: she gives up half a seat. After a poem about suspicion, it ends on solidarity between generations. The stanza also stops the series of accusations and places the women in history, as people who have been paying attention for a long time.
Free verse suits this subject. There is no rhyme scheme and no regular meter. The short lines follow the rhythms of speech and are arranged in six tidy quatrains after the three-line outburst of the opening, which makes the women's lives look orderly beside the panic. The poem is significant because it takes an old, ugly accusation and turns it around without shouting. It lets first names, jokes, roses and a cane-stool answer the cry to "do something."